


[Meta] A Discussion of The Quality of Mercy

by MlleMusketeer



Series: The Quality of Mercy: Supplemental Materials [1]
Category: Transformers: Prime
Genre: Essays, Headcanon, Meta, Meta about fanfiction, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-11
Updated: 2014-01-11
Packaged: 2018-01-08 07:20:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1129881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MlleMusketeer/pseuds/MlleMusketeer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of author commentaries about the world and themes of The Quality of Mercy series. </p><p>It was partway through writing the series that I realized I wouldn't be able to work in everything I wanted to address in the alternate version of the Transformers: Prime universe that I had inadvertently created. I began posting these discussions on Tumblr, where they were appreciated but swiftly vanished into the morass of posts on my blog. Here, I've collected the essays for those interested in the worldbuilding, characters and themes of the series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Doctor Who and The Quality of Mercy

**Author's Note:**

> This is a companion work to 'The Quality of Mercy' series. I strongly recommend reading the series before reading this, and heeding the warnings on it. 
> 
> This piece will also include discussion of many of the issues that the fic includes, and if any of the tags on the series itself is an uncomfortable subject for you, I strongly recommend avoiding this collection of essays.

Doctor Who and Transformers have some similarities. In both cases, an alien puts Earth’s protection above that of the his own species (both Optimus and the Doctor have _destroyed their own worlds_ to save Earth). But there is a major difference in the attitude of these shows toward the Earth and its humans (at least in Bayverse and in Primeverse versus New Who). 

That being humanity’s ability to defend itself. 

In Doctor Who, humans are _just_ as terrifying as the aliens they face. Sure, humanity is screwed to the wall when the Daleks or the Cybermen show up, but often it’s perfectly capable of defending itself. Indeed, in some episodes, humanity is far, far more terrifying than the alien invaders. See the end of _The Christmas Invasion_. “I gave them the wrong warning. I should have told them to run. As fast as they can. Run and hide because the monsters are coming. The human race,” the Doctor says, after humans have destroyed a ship of aliens already fleeing Earth.

We see very little of this in Transformers. In Prime, humanity is helpless against Megatron’s base; in the third movie, the second the Autobots vanish from the scene, the Decepticons wreck Chicago. MECH comes closest to being a legitimate threat, but they are relegated more to villain-of-the-week status, and the one time Silas actually goes up against Megatron ends with him on a dissecting table. 

Little wonder that most bots regard humans as generally helpless and nonthreatening, glorified pets or children. Little wonder that Optimus’s main concern is that humanity be protected, and have no hand in defending _itself._

I wanted to shatter Optimus’s ideas of humanity, and force him to recognize the great and hideous evil that humanity is capable of. I wanted to make Megatron realize that humans constitute an actual, horrifying threat. 

In _Nearest The Spark_ , General Bryce first enslaves Optimus, ordering him to force the coding on Megatron, then unleashes a modified Cybonic Plague on the _Nemesis_ with the full intent of killing all life on it. General Bryce is perfectly convinced that what he’s doing is necessary for humanity’s survival, and therefore sees it as perfectly appropriate to not just condone but _order_ genocide. It is Bryce’s actions that force the Cybertronian members of the cast to recognize that humans are as capable of horrors as they, and that human evil is not confined to a single group. 

 


	2. Good and Evil: More Than Meets the Eye

If there is a single message of the series, it is that no one species, no one group, has a monopoly on evil. Evil is a universal constant; so is good. Even those who have committed terrible evil (Megatron, the rest of the Decepticons) are capable of great good; those who are capable of great good are, too, capable of hideous evil (General Bryce). It is perhaps _because_ of a capability for great good that General Bryce becomes such a monster—as Optimus comments in his conversation with Agent Fowler, “When forced to deeds that threaten their very selves, the selfish beings turn back, and walk a path of lesser evil. The others plunge onward, believing themselves so utterly in the right that their sparks are a small price to pay.” 

(Perhaps I should own up to some small measure of sheepishness for inserting so many of my own philosophical beliefs in a fanfic—but honestly, Optimus does enough pontificating that it seemed in character to me).

But good and evil are not solely confined to big deeds. Indeed, it is my own belief that accumulations of small deeds of kindness or small deeds of petty evil are perhaps the most important in the grand scheme—hence the inclusion of the story of Tailspin and Lightwing.

Tailspin and Lightwing’s tale is one of small deeds of courage in the face of despair. It is indeed true courage that survives, in however small a way, in the face of such overwhelming cruelty and the loss of hope. Here I must admit to being _heavily_ influenced by Tolkien—in the end it is the hobbits who save the day, not the great heroes (though it feels awfully funny comparing two very large purple robots to Frodo and Sam; it should be added that Tailspin is far closer to Sam in my opinion, but I’ve always had a massive soft spot for Sam and still hold that he’s the _true_ hero of The Lord of the Rings). More on Tailspin and Lightwing—my reasons for including them, the reasons they have the backstory they do, their relationship and fate—later.

And on the side of petty evil, we have Johnson. He’s one of the aforementioned ‘selfish beings’—his motivation in working with General Bryce is purely to save his own skin. He doesn’t want to end up like Silas. He certainly isn’t _happy_ about what happened to his mentor, but it takes a back seat to his desire to live comfortably. (He is, however, quite happy to bring it up when he has Optimus at his mercy—he’s not above kicking people when they’re down. It makes him feel powerful). He can be quite nasty when he thinks he’s in control, but is very good at making himself scarce when things go pear-shaped. He’ll always attach himself to what he thinks is the winning team—he won’t try to gain power (differentiating him from Starscream), only make himself very, very useful so that his allies _have_ to protect him. But he’s not a fanatic. He’s going along with his boss of the week, merely applying his skills to his own advantage, and if it means he can have some measure of power over a creature significantly larger than he, so much the better. 

Pulchellus is what happens when you give someone like Johnson a lot of power and the ability to get away with anything they want. The second he loses his power, he stops being a threat—he goes underground and hides, because he doesn’t want to go up against someone who can fight back. He’s an example of petty evil left unchecked; he is just as dangerous, if not more dangerous, than Bryce will ever be.

More on him later. He’s an essay in his own right. 

Mearing is also an example of petty evil—she lines up with General Bryce as far as motivation is concerned. She believes so throughly in her oaths and her duty to her country that she is willing to do morally inexcusable things, but while Bryce may go above and beyond the call of duty, Mearing is careful to do no more than is necessary. The sequence in Chapter 7 of Nearest the Spark, when she forcibly takes control of Optimus, is in her mind necessary. She’s acting as a handler to a large, powerful and intelligent creature which has every reason to hate her, and by every indication has found a way to defy her. She feels out of control of the situation, something she’s well aware could be fatal, and she takes the action that seems necessary after consulting Johnson. It’s not through active malice, but calculated necessity. 

I realize this turned out to be more on evil than on good, but the good guys—at least, two of them—will get their due time in the next installment: _Of Hobbits and Eradicons: Tailspin and Lightwing_


	3. Of Hobbits and Eradicons: Tailspin and Lightwing’s Story

So why is half of _A Pound of Flesh_ about two OCs? Isn’t what you signed up for 100,000+ words of Megatron/Optimus angst and humans being awful? Why are there suddenly a bunch of Eradicons stealing the stage? They’re all named Steve anyway, right?

Let’s just start by saying that the idea that all the Eradicons are clones created by the Decepticons bugs the ever loving scrap out of me. It completely absoloves the Autobots for killing a couple dozen per episodes, and makes the Decepticons look that much worse for claiming to be freedom fighters while running what is more or less a slave army.  While this simplifies morality for the TV show beautifully, it Will Not Do for my purposes. In the early episodes, it is established that Starscream is terrified of losing the Eradicons’ support, which implies that they can a) give it, establishing them as sentient, and b) that they are extremely loyal to Megatron. I wanted to explore what created this loyalty. Why, indeed, do the Eradicons follow Megatron?

In this alternate ‘verse, the Eradicons come from the very lowest classes: the enforcers, the cannon fodder, and so on. They were often slave-coded, treated because of their near-identical frames as semi-sentient at best, and non-consensually modified to present a more uniform front. (The people responsible for this saw little wrong with it; it was their place in the system, after all).  These modifications often weakened them—you didn’t want to risk your cannon fodder being _too_ powerful, or being capable of actually hurting their betters if the slave coding or the brainwashing failed. 

Flyers like Lightwing were often treated somewhat better than grounders like Tailspin; they were slightly more specialized, and very useful in a wider range of situations. Hence Lightwing retaining his gestational tank and Tailspin having his removed as soon as he received his final upgrades. 

Hence, the Eradicons had every reason to desire a new order, and every reason to be fanatically loyal to Megatron. I introduced Tailspin because I wanted to show this progression more personally than I would have been able to through mere conversation between Optimus and Megatron. I also chose not to go the reader-feeder route because it would have continued to rob the Eradicons of agency, which happens to them enough in canon. 

The other reason for including Tailspin and Lightwing was that I’d heard one of the original intended themes throughout Transformers: Prime was the creation of Primes, of ordinary Cybertronians taking up the mantle of leadership. Of course, by ‘ordinary Cybertronians’, the show meant ‘Autobots who have maximum kid appeal’, but it got me thinking—who would be a more unlikely leader than a Vehicon? Bottom of the social ladder on Cybertron, bottom of the military ladder in the Decepticons, often mistaken for non-sentient and treated accordingly (count the number of times Eradicons are killed for laughs in Prime, it’ll make you sad)—Tailspin and his colleagues couldn’t be less prepared for leadership. 

But that doesn’t mean that they were incapable of it. 

By including Tailspin, I wanted to challenge the assumptions we make about disposable ‘bad guys’. I wanted to show him dealing with a horrible situation and the ghosts of his past, and doing it as well as any main character would have. I wanted to give him huge responsibility, and have him succeed in rescuing himself and all his compatriots from MECH. 

When Tailspin and his rag-tag group of Eradicons and Vehicons come into view, having rescued themselves and the main character who was sent to save _them_ , it is the death-knell of Cybertron’s caste system. At long last, the faceless drones are stepping up and taking their place alongside all other Cybertronians as equals. 

  That is why I thought their story needed to be included. They are small and easily discounted, but just as capable as any other character, just as capable of love and cruelty, sparkbreak and triumph.  


	4. The Miner, Megatronus, Megatron and Lord Megatron

Imagine, if you will, Cybertron, a Cybertron still under Quintesson rule. It’s a rule that’s about to end, because somewhere, some clever mecha have found a way to turn the Quintesson’s most prized weapon against them. 

It’s the slave coding. At this point, only those in direct domestic or military service to Quintessons have it; the population of Cybertron is big enough that it simply isn’t economically worthwhile to code every last miner. It would raise all sorts of other difficulties as well, including the possibility that someone or other has some sort of variation in their coding that will render the slave programs useless. But for those serving their masters personally, the coding is necessary, a security precaution. Soldiers and guards have it. Domestic servants have it. Doctors have it. Anyone in administrative positions has it.

It’s unclear how a group of mecha have managed to repurpose this tool. Perhaps one of them was the lucky slagger with variations in his or her coding that rendered the slave coding useless. Perhaps someone from the lower classes obtained a copy and messed around with it a bit. There are a lot of ways this could have happened. But it has, and these very clever mecha are putting two and two together and getting hope. 

Because anyone carrying slave coding will be trustworthy. They can’t be threatened into cooperation. Their nerve isn’t going to break when they’re threatened with torture or the deaths of their loved ones. No price is going to be sufficient to persuade them to change sides. All of these things snuffed revolutions before they began: this time, there’s a chance of preventing all of them. 

Those coded by their fellow Cybertronians accept it voluntarily. It’s the necessary price of the freedom of their people. It’s an assurance of trust. They organize themselves into cells, and before you can say “Cybertronians, rise up!” (where do you think Megatron got his slogan?) the resistance is off the ground. 

Sometime early on, just as the Cybertronians get enough momentum to start some major operations (rather than the occasional jailbreak or stolen energon) a young miner gets involved. He’s both proud and a fierce patriot; being treated as chattel has been hard on him and it’s a wonder he’s survived this long without getting offlined by a nervous overseer. He does well; though he’s dismissed as being too young and hardheaded to be good officer material, he has a talent for destruction, and is damnably _clever_. 

The end of the war is a matter of history. The Cybertronians, secure in the knowledge that the Quintessons won’t be coming back for a long, long time, settle down to picking up the pieces of their society and rebuilding everything they are. The young soldier returns to the mines a free mech, the coding taken offline the day he handed in his resignation, and for a while life is everything he hoped for. There is equality, and there is joy even in the hard, dangerous labor because they are free.

That doesn’t last long. There’s a string of rebellions (which our young miner stays out of), because after every regime change, there’s always someone who sees it as an opportunity for their advancement. After the rebellions, things begin to go downhill. Energon rationing. Working conditions in the mines start going downhill. Newsfeeds stop their squabbling and start churning out eerily similar reports and opinions. 

Of course all of this happens so gradually that it’s hardly noticeable. Indeed, the reason our young miner leaves the mines has little to do with revolutionary intentions; in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. It’s an accident. Or maybe several. Either way, he decides that if he’s going to offline, he’s going to do it in the open air and people are going to pay attention. If he’d intended to gutter out in a hole in the ground, he’d have done so at the hands of that Quintesson interrogator during the war. 

He finds himself in Kaon, and here his talent for destruction and his cleverness come back into play, in and out of the arena. It’s a vicious hard life, in ways still worse than that of the mines, but when he dies he will do it facing his enemy, and that suddenly matters a lot to young Megatronus, as he’s named himself. But things get worse, and a dissatisfaction grows in Megatronus’s spark, the memories of what it was like just after the war.

The ideas take a long time to really form. After all, he’s been told he’s not officer material, let alone a politician, but soon he realizes that those who told him that are now the ones rationing his energon and telling those like him to keep their places at the bottom rung of society, starve quietly without causing a fuss. He notices that other mecha look up to him and listen to him and when he finds himself having to sell his services and frame to yet another new master, something snaps. The gladiator turns revolutionary, and Cybertron takes notice. 

We know the rough shape of the rest: Megatronus’s movement gaining momentum. A young archivist contacting the (by now not-young-at-all) gladiator. The jaded gladiator falling in love, and a brief and (for the nobility) terrifying glance at a Cybertron that could have been, an equal Cybertron. 

One noble, Megatronus’s sponsor, a vicious little slagger by the name of Pulchellus, takes things into his own hands, reactivating Megatronus’s slave coding. Megatronus breaks it and escapes, but the damage has been done; he is no longer idealistic, and now he knows that the nobility is irredeemable. Pulchellus’s crimes, the crimes of his political cronies, attest to that. The other high castes Megatronus receives judgement on; Orion Pax is enough of a reason for that, and the little archivist still gives him hope. 

He renames himself Megatron, because his enslavement lends an unpleasant sound to the name Megatronus, and Megatron is _his_ , not some title he shares with a Prime long dead, a Prime who would have understood _nothing_ of the way the majority of his descendants lived. 

Megatron begins to rise in the world. Before long, he and Orion have a hearing in front of the Council.

History again tells us how this went, how Orion’s acceptance of the title of Prime caused Megatron to storm off in a jealous snit. It does not speak of Megatron’s shock and horror as the mech he trusted most in the world turned his back and betrayed him, full knowing the crimes of the system he swore allegiance to. In that meeting, one thing became clear to Megatron, and that was that he would always be betrayed. He was betrayed by the people he fought to free; betrayed again by the government he supported; betrayed yet again into the hands of Pulchellus; and at last betrayed by the lover he’d all but handed his spark to.

To an outside observer, he doesn’t break. To those of his inner circle, however, he changes. That peculiar edge of idealism that has always pervaded his actions changes, hardens into a vicious practicality. There’s no more emotional vulnerability. He trusts Soundwave. He trusts Shockwave. But with business, with the Decepticon Cause, not with his spark. He starts insisting on being addressed as Lord Megatron. The aspiring politician is gone; what remains is an efficient, vicious leader, the untouchable figurehead and master of the Decepticon Cause, characterized only by his burning hatred for Optimus Prime and all that he represents.


	5. Love is a Four Letter Word

It is entirely intentional that neither Optimus nor Megatron ever say, “I love you”, to the other. Or, at least not in those exact words. There’s a lot at play here, and most of it can be filed under _Megatron Has Issues_. Declarations of his determination to protect Optimus, and of his desire to revenge himself on those who have wronged his Prime, the use of the possessive when he refers to Optimus—these are as close to declarations of love as Megatron is ever going to get. 

So why have I made such a point of this?

Recall that Megatron comes from the pits of Kaon, and is a gladiator—meaning he comes from a hyper-agressive culture that strongly discourages any shows of ‘weak’ (in other words, not anger) emotion, especially affection. Any public display of affection would usually be meant as a demonstration of possession and dominance by the initiating partner. When it comes to relationships, the sexual component would be highly emphasized, and the emotional downplayed; a demonstration of emotional attachment in such a society would be highly unwise.  With strength and brutality being the most important qualities necessary to gain and maintain social standing, a known emotional connection to another bot would a weakness that others would seek to exploit. This is the culture that produced Overlord, after all. 

It is also dangerous to admit such an affection to a partner. They might use it against you, if it is to their benefit, and the ways in which it might be exploited (transferring slave coding during interface being only the _tip_ of the iceberg) were many. 

So therefore, “MINE” is the most common expression of sincere affection in Cybertronian gladiatorial culture. Optimus, given his previous experiences as Orion with Megatron, accepts this—he knows that any outright declaration of love would make Megatron deeply uncomfortable, and his own taciturn nature is not exactly conducive to such displays in any case. While he is fully aware of the necessity of occasionally discouraging Megatron from taking “mine” too literally, he appreciates the sentiment as it’s meant. 


End file.
